Ferocity Summer

by Alissa Grosso

  As I got older, it occurred to me that maybe Earl wasn’t so crazy about a committed relationship with a woman with baggage. It’s nothing I know for certain. After the break-up, Mom stayed in bed and cried for a week. It felt like the world was going to end, but somehow it didn’t.

  What kind of childhood is this? It seems so utterly bleak, but there was good stuff, too, I’m sure. I won some kind of art contest at school once. Mom hung the painting on the living room wall, but eventually it started to fade from the sunlight and had to be taken down.

  I think when I was younger, I had a better imagination. I was able to see the future, and it was always this bright and happy place. Now I couldn’t see anything. I felt like my life was almost over.

  I was supposed to be cleaning the bathroom. I was, sort of, but at the pace I was going I wouldn’t finish by the end of the day, let alone have time to get to all my other chores. I couldn’t help it. I kept thinking about Mom, about how she wanted me to be something she could be proud of. It felt like she wanted to control my life, like she didn’t want me to be my own person. Maybe she didn’t even like who I was, whoever I was. I knew she hated Willow. She thought she knew everything about Willow, but she didn’t know her at all. She didn’t like her because Willow had more money than us, and she thought the only reason I liked Willow was because she had the money that I craved.

  I threw the sponge I’d been scrubbing the tub with at the wall. My mother thought she knew everything, but she didn’t know shit.

  General Sherman’s adoptive father was the one who arranged for his acquisition of a Christian first name. He was also the one who pulled the necessary strings to get young Willy T. into West Point. Basically, he was the one who mapped out Sherman’s life. Hell, maybe he was even the one to suggest that Sherman marry his daughter, keep everything neat and tidy or whatever. On the one hand, I felt bad for Sherman, whose whole future was pretty much preordained. On the other hand, I thought maybe what I needed was a stepfather of my own, someone who could grease the wheels, come up with some plan that would put me on the fast track to lifelong success. My mother was woefully underqualified for the position.

  The phone rang. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed it on the third ring. I was still wearing the rubber dish gloves to protect myself from cleaner powerful enough to melt mildew on contact.

  “How’s tricks?” Willow asked.

  “I’ve got a list of chores to do today. Want to help me wash the windows?”

  “Blow it off. Let’s go out.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Wash the goddamn windows tomorrow.”

  It was about all the persuasion I needed.

  Later That Day

  When I was in seventh grade, we were subjected to a series of propaganda films cautioning us against the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. Perhaps the most bizarre trait common to all those films was how much they seemed to glorify the very things they were supposed to be denigrating. In all of them, the cool kids were shown having the times of their lives with the aid of controlled substances while the geeky losers attempted to exemplify the moral of the story. Lesson learned: partying is cool. If you don’t drink or do drugs, then you’ll go through life with a bad haircut feeling miserable.

  I remembered one of those films distinctly. It was called Bad Influences. It was meant to illustrate the dangers of peer pressure. In it, a mousy girl with an ugly green sweater is lured into the naughty world of booze by one of her more well-rounded classmates. Green sweater gets drunk, trades her sweater for a stylish tank top, finds social acceptance, and wakes up the following morning with a hangover. Naturally, the hangover convinces her that drinking is really, really bad. She puts her green sweater back on and lives miserably ever after, or so we are led to believe.

  I’ve been that girl with the ugly green sweater. I’ve been the social-outcast misfit. I’ve also been lured, through the persuasive efforts of my peers, into behavior that is not condoned by parents and guidance counselors. I’ve discovered a world that can’t be experienced by those who stick to the straight and narrow, and I like this world immensely at times. I would like to say that my own personal equivalent of green sweater’s hangover scared me back into miserable teetotaling behavior, but that would not be entirely true. Peer pressure is a difficult thing to resist, mostly because in all of us, there is a part that has no desire to resist.

  Sherman learned to look the other way when his own soldiers committed acts of atrocity in retaliation for guerrilla violence against them. It’s not the same thing, I know, but a part of me thinks that Sherman, who was always before that such a stickler for order, finally said what the hell. Maybe he wanted his soldiers to like him, or maybe he was just so sick to death of the whole war that he didn’t care anymore. Whatever the case, it seems that after just one little taste of raising hell, Sherman was hooked. He was the mighty potato smasher once again.

  I sat in the dark and shabby waiting room of Pointless Pursuits, our town’s only tattoo parlor, watching rain splatter on the porch outside. There was only so much money to be made in tattoos. The shop doubled as a drug dealing operation. That’s what we were doing there.

  Willow had sped into my driveway and whisked me away from my Cinderella day, but she was no fairy godmother. Her promise of mayhem, magic, and adventure had led us only as far as the shabby little roadside tattoo parlor with its purple neon sign and its creepy, grimy waiting area. Willow had left me to the companionship of the tattered couch with its stained afghan and the coffee table piled high with tattoo magazines.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right out,” she promised, disappearing through a beaded curtain into the shadowy depths of Pointless Pursuits.

  A couple minutes later, I looked up at the sound of rustling beads. There, standing in the doorway, was the woman of my dreams. The pinkishy amber light that made its way through the beads did an adequate job of highlighting her not-quite-hourglass figure. At first, I thought I must be trapped in a very realistic fantasy and wondered if it wasn’t some sort of secondhand high.

  “Heard you guys got suspended,” Andrea said, stepping out into the waiting room.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That sucks, but hey, at least you get a day off. I called in sick. Had to have this minor surgery. I would show you, but I’m supposed to leave the bandage on until it heals.”

  I imagined a butterfly tattooed on one of her round ass cheeks, but no such luck. Andrea offered me a peek at her bandaged shoulder.

  “A rose,” she explained. “I know, not very original, but I figure it’s timeless.”

  “It will look pretty with a dress,” I said. Flirtation is not my strong suit.

  “I heard Meg Ambrosio got a Davies Pauliny tattoo last week. That’s just way too trendy. I mean, how do you even know they’ll be around next year?”

  I shrugged. I wanted to point out that Davies Pauliny, who had sprung from the ether only a month ago, might not be around in another four weeks, let alone another year, but I was having trouble making ordinary conversation. I couldn’t concentrate. Every sexual fantasy I had dreamed up involving Andrea was spinning through my mind simultaneously.

  “Call me some time,” Andrea said. “We can hang out.”

  I felt dizzy.

  Andrea left, and I returned to passing the time. I watched the rain fall. I flipped through a couple of tattoo magazines without seeing anything. I wished I’d brought a book. There was a drip somewhere in the building. The persistent drip, drip, drip echoed in my head until it was completely impossible to ignore. There was no sign of Willow.

  For some time, Willow had cultivated the image of being a relatively straight arrow, a person who kept her vices in check. Most people assumed she was a decent girl who drank a respectable amount of alcohol and smoked the occasional pot. Even her own drug dealer couldn’t entirely see through Willow’s well-crafted exterior. Only I knew that for the past ten months Willow had been hitting the drugs in a big-time way, tha
t every penny she had was invested solely in digestible substances that would leave her in an altered state, that lately this insatiable passion seemed to be growing at a frenetic rate. My own experience with drugs was practically nonexistent, but I knew that Willow’s present flight pattern could be stopped only by serious clinical help or death. We had been best friends off and on since second grade, a fact that left me in the awkward position of playing the useless enabler to Willow’s downward-spiral-spinning dope fiend. We were quite a pair.

  The bead curtains clinked again. I looked up quickly, but unless Willow had suddenly grown a three-day shadow and a beer belly, this was not her.

  “You want a beer or something while you’re waiting for your friend?” the man asked.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  He took this as an invitation to sit down and chat with me. “Crappy weather, huh?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “My name’s Craig. I’m the artist.”

  I think I giggled. The way he said it, it was like he was the only artist in the entire world.

  He winked at me. “You got a name?”

  “Scilla.”

  He was giving me the look. Apparently he thought he had quite a lot to offer me, and that for some insane reason I would be very much enticed.

  “I should go look for her,” I said to Craig the artist, and quickly got up and passed through the curtain to the other side. I found a hallway with a bunch of closed doors. “Damn it,” I said. She had to be behind one of them. I flung open the doors one by one. Tattoo room. Office. Closet. The fourth door, a bathroom, was locked. I knocked once, quietly. Nothing. I pounded a few more times.

  “Just a minute.” It was Willow’s voice from the other side of the door, but it was weak and faint and sounded impossibly far away.

  “It’s me.”

  I heard movement inside. The lock clicked open and the door opened a crack. I pushed it the rest of the way and went in, closing it behind me. Willow was holding a tissue up to her nose, her head tilted back. I saw her face reflected in the mirror. There was blood smeared under her nose, and more on the tissue.

  “It’s nothing,” she assured me.

  Her streaky hair was stringy and damp. It hung limply, and in the light of the bathroom looked faded and discolored. Her face looked weird, all ghastly pale and almost gray. Only her eyes had color, but they were that too-bright blue, glassy like junkie eyes. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, and for a moment I thought she was going to pass out.

  A few small puddles of blood dotted the powder blue tiles of the bathroom floor. I wrapped a wad of toilet paper around my hand, tore it off, and began mopping up the little red puddles. Willow watched me. She made a strange noise and shook her head as if to tell me not to, but I didn’t pay any attention to her. Looking at the red stains on the floor and, out of the corner of my eye, at Willow’s gaunt form on the toilet, I had a vision of her with bobbed hair and a pleated skirt hiding a diaphragm under a bench in Washington Square Park. I couldn’t suppress the giggle that found its way into my mouth.

  That night we made our way to a small beach party where our classmates were gathered to toast the coming summer with beer, wine, and any other alcoholic substances they could get their underaged hands on. It was probably more difficult to get ahold of than the narcotic substances Willow had purchased that afternoon.

  As luck would have it, tomorrow was Baccigalupi Day, the not quite officially sanctioned day when upperclassmen skipped school. It made our suspension seem almost ironic.

  Willow had taken it upon herself to play the role of life of the party. She had surrounded herself with a group of guys and girls, all of them drunk/stoned/high enough to find her amazingly entertaining.

  I wasn’t in much of a celebratory mood. There had been the incident of Willow’s bleeding nose, of course, and then there was the wrath of my mother that I would need to face sooner or later. Finally, there was my life stretching out before me, an endless blank canvas. The only colors I had to paint with were gray and brown and black.

  I lay on the sand watching a boy and two girls risk death by hypothermia by swimming in the too-cold spring water out to the dock. They hadn’t bothered to bring bathing suits, and the one girl had ditched both her shirt and her bra before getting in the water. I watched her run around on the dock, her pale breasts glowing in the moonlight. She looked cold, carefree, and completely drunk, and I wished I could be her instead of me.

  Somewhere behind me, I heard a couple of boys talking about something. I heard the word “ferocity” mentioned a few times and tried to listen harder. I couldn’t make any sense of the conversation.

  I think that’s about when I knew it was going to be my shittiest summer ever, as impossible as that seemed.

  June

  Priscilla, Mr. Berm informs me that you are failing history,” Ms. Shirley, my guidance counselor, said.

  I sat across from her wearing my best Dutiful Student face. It wasn’t easy. There was a week left of school but my mind had already gone on vacation.

  Shirley’s office was bursting with motivational posters, plaques, and knickknacks. I imagined she had some sort of insatiable craving for the crap. I pictured her at a flea market, unable to resist a faded and worn copy of the Serenity poster. She probably had to avoid office supply stores altogether in case she accidentally came across a display of those encouragement posters.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” Shirley said. She glared at me through her oversized glasses. It was no real shock that she wasn’t married. I wondered if she had been laid any time in the past decade.

  “It’s only history,” I said. “I’m passing everything else.”

  “You won’t graduate next year if you don’t get a passing grade. I spoke to Mr. Berm. He said you could make up your work in summer school.” She made it sound like she had done me a big favor. Does the world really need guidance counselors? They never seem to provide the guidance we really need.

  What I wanted to say to her was, My friend’s trying to poison herself with drugs, I can’t maintain a normal romantic relationship to save my life, and there’s a very strong possibility I might have to go to jail for killing someone. What should I do, oh great guidance provider?

  Instead I said, “I can’t go to summer school. I have to work. I need the money.”

  “Well, dammit, Priscilla, maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to stop going to history class.”

  I hadn’t completely stopped going. I was sure I’d been there at least once that week. And it wasn’t like I had any issues with Mr. Berm, except for his stupid alphabetical seating chart that forced me to sit directly next to Joe Bullock. Was it surprising that I preferred to hide in the media center rather than sit there and put up with Joe’s stupid comments?

  “Well, you’ll have to talk to Mr. Berm yourself, then,” Shirley said. “And for godsakes, drop the attitude.”

  I glanced around the room for something that displayed this particular sentiment, because I thought it was a sort of a catchy one, but no such luck. Most of them were way more flowery.

  Berm’s office was as cluttered as Shirley’s but it seemed to lack any real theme. Most teachers didn’t even get their own office, but he was head mucky-muck of history and was therefore awarded a small and cramped room probably designed as a supply closet. I had nothing against Berm or history in general, other than the fact that of all school subjects, it seemed to be the least relevant.

  “You know, Davis,” Berm said, “I think I had your mother as a student here a long time ago.”

  “My mother didn’t go to school here.”

  “Jenny Davis. Well, she looked like you at least.” Berm glanced past me, at something infinitely more fascinating on the bookshelf behind me.

  “Um, Ms. Shirley said that I was failing and that I needed to talk to you about making up some work, but I can’t go to summer school. I need to get a job.”

  “Entering the rat
race, eh? Well, you’ll regret it soon enough.” He flipped through his grade book. I sniffed at the air. It had an unpleasant smell, a sort of musty smell mixed in with that sweaty odor old people tend to give off. I felt a little sick.

  “You’re not failing that badly,” he said. “Maybe you could do some sort of extra-credit work over the summer. Read a book or two, write a paper, that sort of thing.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I don’t hate school because I’m stupid; I hate school because it’s boring as all hell. It’s an institution designed by and for robots, and I’ve never been a very good robot. I like to consume information at my own pace rather than have it shoved down my throat. In summers past, when a big pile of second-hand books took the place of a babysitter, nobody wanted me to summarize the plot in a two-page paper or make a diorama of my favorite scene. Summer used to be fun.

  “Tell me—what was the most fascinating thing we studied all year, in your opinion?”

  My mind blanked out. I couldn’t remember a single thing that we’d studied.

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t use the word ‘fascinating’ to describe history.”

  “No? History is everything. History isn’t just about the past. It’s the present and the future, too. It’s where we begin, the basis for everything. There wasn’t anything at all that you found remotely interesting?”

  The Civil War. We had definitely studied the Civil War. The milk container I drank from at lunch came back to me. In an effort to infiltrate us with education, the milk cartons came printed with “Interesting Facts.”